A Bolder Humboldt

Making Towns that Work: Ambitious Placemaking in Rural America with A Bolder Humboldt

A Crisis of Vitality

The last 40 years hasn’t been kind to small towns across the US. Almost every aspect of life in rural areas has been under assault. Businesses are closing or have long closed, main streets have been abandoned and buildings are falling apart, jobs are increasingly scarce, housing stock is dwindling, and worst of all young people are giving up and not coming back.

While that’s a rather bleak way to start a case study, there is hope! In the small town of Humboldt Kansas there has been flurry of activity in the opposite direction; a group of folks that have grabbed the reins of community development, determined to make their town work.

Humboldt’s revitalization has taken the form of a new brewery, hotels, a campground, bars, restaurants, a candy shop, a music venue, a garden school, a bookshop, ice cream shop a shave ice stand, parks, trails, signage, and more at an accelerating pace.

Action Removes Doubt

This project is now known as A Bolder Humboldt, and started out in 2016 with the simple statement: “let’s make the town we want to live in” but while the words were easy, the path seemed unlikely. Conventional wisdom held that the challenges were almost insurmountable; every business that left, every house torn down, and every civic organization that was aging out had all happened for reasons–and none of those reasons had changed.

Kei Partner, Paul Cloutier was one of those people–also a partner with ABH–working to navigate the massive challenge of redesigning a community. This near life-long effort gives us a front row seat to this work and a seat at the table to help contribute.

There has–for much of the second half of the 20th century until now–been a familiar model for town revitalization that is often led by municipalities and main street orgs, that takes a top down, incentive-driven approach. The problem with this has always been a disconnect from strategy and execution; the money people commission outsiders to have ideas, and then tell locals to execute. The first innovation that we settled on with A Bolder Humboldt was to flatten that strategy and execution into a process that can best be described as "Strategic Action"; working in such a way that would allow us to build and assess, build and assess. This allowed us to learn what was necessary as we went and adjust based on what was working. Taking lessons from lean startups and applying it to buildings and towns has been a real accelerant to town making.

It was this initial effort of building small that began to erode the skepticism of what was possible. Seeing something done was like a spark in dry tinder, and a small fire of enthusiasm started quickly.

A Vision As Well As An Organization

But it's not all just rolling up our sleeves, we had to develop a sense of ambition and direction as well as giving us a sense of how to prioritize. The team often says that while ABH is an organization, it is more importantly a vision, describing the nature of what a bolder version of our town could be. This vision describes our sense of purpose, the projects we believe we deserve, and a spirit of the people that we try to attract and hold on to.

The vision is best represented by the town itself, while we have created plans, and documents, and strategies, the best way to engage with what could be is to explore what is, spending time in the place and with the people. And so we have created a very immersive process of community engagement, inviting residents and visitors alike to experience Humboldt's transformation firsthand.

The real innovation here is this purpose-driven approach. The truth is that revitalization projects like this are often done in a very piecemeal way, addressing individual issues without considering the broader context. The ABH process is a more holistic view, considering how each project contributes to the overall vision of a "bolder" Humboldt.

A Home for Ambitious Creativity

It has been said that Kansas's greatest export is its young people. But while rural areas are losing people, cities and dense urban areas are increasingly too costly for creative people to take risks. Opening a restaurant or becoming a furniture maker are almost completely out of reach of most people there. Right in the middle of the strategy for revitalizing Humboldt is the belief that if you are young, creative and ambitious there is no better place for you. As Cloutier said in the Kansas City Star, “You can be ambitious and have dreams here at a reasonable scale. You want to be an artist? Come to rural America. You can dedicate almost all your time to making cool stuff happen, without having to run on the treadmill of keeping up in a larger city.” Developing recruiting tools and a core marketing narrative to attract these people has seen success, bringing critical members and workers to town. At a small scale, it doesn’t take much to make a real difference.

Creating Destinations with Branding

An original principle for this project was that in order to be able to compete with the larger formula and chain businesses was to offer something that they could not or would not. Our belief was that creating something that felt unique and quality–something you could only get in Humboldt—has driven most of the design decisions. Too often the answer to fading opportunity is to scale back, to diminish the experience rather than invest further, and the team fundamentally rejected that idea; how could we get people to stick around and spend more money if we were slowly getting worse. So every project has invested heavily in brand experience, from custom wallpaper, to re-crafted mosaic tile entrances, to neon signage, to custom scent generators, to all manner of branded products for each property. The goal has been to create something that at least feels competitive with the biggest cities’ experiences, but more importantly can only be had if you come to Humboldt.

Facing a world where more and more consolidation of brands is happening, and an increasing standardization of what things feel like has created a template driven city, the only answer is to create a destination that revels in being itself.

The Humboldt Vernacular

In the spirit of being a destination, too many towns have given up their sense of place, the qualities that make them unique based on their local materials, culture and traditions. Travelers to places like San Francisco, New York and Kyoto, know that those places are defined by their redwood victorians, their brownstones, their temple architecture. And so it was with this in mind that we defined the "Humboldt Vernacular”, a style guide of sorts that is inspired by local materials that we can use and reuse to create a sense of place.

The Humboldt Vernacular draws on the town's rich material inheritance, from the home grown Black Walnut, locally quarried limestone, Humboldt’s history with brick making, a local concrete plant, and the metal working tradition that comes from B&W, a beloved Humboldt manufacturer. These have all led to our regular use of walnut lumber, COR-TEN patina steel, limestone facades, and brick. In one way or another every project has included a discussion and consideration of how to create something that pushes the boundaries of what is possible while still considering what will fit in.

Next up in this effort is the unified town branding system and wayfinding that helps people navigate the trails and tie together all of the disparate visual systems from numerous groups that need to communicate as one “Voice of Humboldt"

Treating the Cause Not the Symptoms

As with so many complex projects, understanding the root causes of a problem is often harder than treating the seemingly random symptoms. Restarting a grocery store in a town like Humboldt means rebuilding much of the entire food ecosystem, from farm, to packing, to storage, to delivery, to customer demand even. Starting a brewery requires hospitality training at a scale that hasn’t existed in generations here. And bringing workers and entrepreneurs to town is held back by housing that has been neglected for years in a market that can’t yet support new construction. So, this means much of the work that starts with a desired outcome, means tracking back to a root cause and realizing your desire to open a bar means you have to write ballot language and get the whole county to vote to change the laws first. (This was something we ended up having to do.)

Building the Flywheels

To trade on the metaphor of restarting the economic “engine” of a place for a moment, we approached many of the problems with the idea of a flywheel in mind. If we have areas of momentum, we work to map out the opportunities that can take advantage of that momentum as well as further spin them up.

This process starts with identifying those flywheels and then mapping out how they are being supported and where there are gaps in experience. The first flywheels have been:

More than Tourism

A common playbook for revitalization is tourism, but tourism–while very important–often misses what makes a place vibrant and real. Any revitalization effort can’t simply focus on visitors, and must provide opportunities for residents while making room for new residents.

A Community Needs 3 Things to be Vibrant:

Lean-to Business

An early lesson added into the toolkit has been what we termed the “lean-to business”. This is has meant placing a few ideas together under one roof to help prototype ideas before we spin them out into their own spaces with their own staff. Putting a local products mercantile in in the coffee shop allowed a certain amount of experimentation while leveraging the shared overhead, preexisting sales people, and the steady flow of traffic that otherwise might have been challenging. Or putting a small record shop in the book store that if successful can be spun out into its own space, and if not then it can just stay as a smaller “experience” in the book store.

An Epidemic of Isolation

One of the great challenges our civilization faces is an increasing feeling of distance from each other. The lack of “third spaces” where people of different types and backgrounds can gather has contributed to an increasing sense of loneliness and isolation. Rebuilding these gathering spaces is one of the most important efforts in this whole project. One of the very first steps of this project was to establish such a place in the form of a coffee shop (a coffee shop now spun out of its lean-to business model and called Octagon City Coffee). This space enabled local folks to “bump into” each other, provided a gathering place for meetings and a beacon to visitors that there was a “there, there” to meet the locals. Since then, the creation of the brewery, bars, restaurants and live music, has created a vibrant social scene in town attracting both locals and visitors alike. The palpable sense of activity–with groups of people bar-hopping and coming to town for dinner and music–on a weekend night is a radical shift from the previous emptiness.

Humboldt's story offers valuable lessons for other rural communities facing similar challenges. Cloutier reflects, "What we've learned is that successful rural revitalization isn't just about economic development. It's about creating a sense of place, fostering community pride, and building an ecosystem where people want to live, work, and visit."

What Comes Next

As Humboldt enters the next phase of its journey, the town stands as a testament to what's possible when visionary thinking meets strategic execution. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly praised the initiative, stating, "There's no better example of the growth and success we're seeing in Kansas than in places like Humboldt."

For Kei, the Humboldt project represents a new frontier in their work. "What we've done here goes beyond traditional consulting or design work," Cloutier concludes. "It's about reimagining what's possible for rural communities in the 21st century. And in doing so, we're not just changing one town – we're creating a model that could help revitalize rural America."